It's been a terrible year for women in this country. Utterly appalling. Just last month, three women were murdered over the course of a few hours. Just this week, the member for Indi, Helen Haines, was attacked with a car. Both her legs have been amputated.
But there is one group of women who never get much attention.
And why is that? It's because they are Aboriginal. In the same way Australia rejected the Voice, we appear to reject the idea that Aboriginal women's lives matter.
We know so much now but that theory isn't put into practice. And we urgently need government funding to make change. If we don't do that soon, many more Aboriginal women will die.
To be honest, I don't think I was all that good about recognising the differences, the individual needs. In my early days of writing about violence against women, all the deaths of women were lumped together.
We knew about the perpetrators - and 99 per cent of the time, those perpetrators were men. But the individual circumstances mattered not to me. I had zero idea that they certainly mattered in the case of the victims.
Many many years ago now, maybe nearly 20, I met a young woman called Antoinette Braybrook. She set me straight. I'd already learnt a lot from other activists but Braybrook made the circumstances of Aboriginal women her life's work and she took the time, although she never had much spare, to talk me through it.
She's a lawyer, a Kuku Yalanji woman and chief executive of Djirra, an Aboriginal-controlled family violence prevention and legal service. And this week, she insisted in the only way she can that I write about the alleged murder of Jayda Allen Bonner.
On Saturday, October 10, Jayda was allegedly murdered by her partner, Liban Ali, in Melbourne's inner city. He's been charged with murder. Jayda was just 21 years old. Twenty-one. What should have been just the beginning of her adult life.
There were so many red flags around this young woman's circumstances. So many. Yet not one attracted the right kind of attention, the attention of experts in violence against Aboriginal women.
Braybrook says that the murder of Jayda shows we are a long way from acting on what we already know, a long way from acting to prevent yet another murder.
Here's what we know about Jayda's death so far. After her murder, she was so badly beaten her body was unrecognisable to her family. The alleged perpetrator, Liban Ali, was already known to police, courts and protections. He'd served time in prison. Complaints were made by the family about the risk he posed to Jayda, begging for intervention. Victoria Police said there were allegations of protracted family violence prior to Jayda's death and the young woman herself made a complaint to police six weeks prior but withdrew it. This is common, by the way. Women get sucked into promises that the perpetrator will change. They never change. And sometimes it's the threats which make them withdraw.
Strangely though, Victoria Police didn't act to issue a Family Violence Safety Notice against Liban Ali. It can do that through the Family Violence Protection Act 2008 (Vic). That would have enabled the removal of the alleged offender from the home. And stranger still, no one called upon Aboriginal specialist services to help. Why are these services so invisible to police, courts and corrections? They might have saved Jayda's life.
According to Counting Dead Women, 39 women have been killed, victims of violence in 2026 - and this year alone, seven of those women were Aboriginal, according to Djirra's records. We don't know the outcome of each of the cases yet - but where perpetrators have been identified, in the cases of these women, only one is an Aboriginal man.
But in each and every case of gendered violence, we need to start recognising that there are patterns. And if we recognise those patterns - if agencies act on those patterns, we can save lives.
Braybrook is despairing: "This is more than a murder case, it is a widespread system failure. Jayda's death was preventable, not inevitable."
Here's how we can save lives. Djirra has launched a Strong, Safe, Together campaign which calls for each and every party to commit to investing in women's safety. Right now, it's targeting the Victorian state election, so of course there is a call for parties to fully commit to the implementation of the Yoorook Justice Commission, especially recommendations relating to the safety of Aboriginal women.
But as Braybrook knows all too well, this is a national problem, not a one-state problem. There should be commitments from every state and from every territory. There should be a massive commitment from the federal government.
"It doesn't matter where you live in this country, you're not safe. Capital cities, remote areas. Systems that are meant to protect, fail us," she says.
"We want to know why the system can lock us up, take our children away but not immediately connect us to specialist family violence services or intervene to save lives.
"The same machinery so readily mobilised to criminalise Aboriginal women, must be made to respond when our lives are at risk."
Every state and territory must have an Aboriginal women's centre to deliver life-saving services and life-changing programs. Braybrook says Djirra would need just $16 million to fully implement those programs. And if it got that much, it would save the state government $50 million over the next four years. Already the work it does prevents incarceration, out-of-home care costs and intervention-order applications. Even better, fully funded, no Aboriginal woman would ever have to travel more than one hour to get help.
"Governments impose so-called solutions on us and ignore ours - I've been calling for the same things for two decades," she says.
"When women come to the justice system for support to put an end to violence, how the justice system responds needs to be impeccable. It's a matter of life and death for women."
Governments can work to make it stop. They need to act now.